Jordyn Guevara, 9, colors and labels a cut-out paper fish in preparation for a dissection the following week in Shevon Morris’ fourth-grade science class at King school in Stamford on Tuesday. King is celebrating 150 years. Jordyn's father and mother are alumni of King, 1993 and 1997 respectively. less

Jordyn Guevara, 9, colors and labels a cut-out paper fish in preparation for a dissection the following week in Shevon Morris’ fourth-grade science class at King school in Stamford on Tuesday. King is ... more

STAMFORD — The archives of the King school sit at the top of three flights of stairs, in a pair of small rooms in the attic of the old white Simon House on Newfield Avenue.

The 150-year history of the three institutions that merged to create the independent school now known as King is spread out over several bookcases in a room with bare floors and crumbling wallpaper. Binders full of press clippings stand alongside a filing cabinet full of black-and-white photos. A table near the window holds several dusty football trophies. A sheet covers a bookcase full of letters and diary entries by an early school leader.

“This room was the classic repository of stuff that you know you can’t throw away,” said Rick Starr, a retired educator and archivist who has been hired by King to organize, digitize and preserve the school’s historic documents and memorabilia.

“Archives aren’t really archives if they’re kept in cardboard boxes,” he said with a smile. “If it’s just sitting there, it doesn’t serve you well.”

The 2015-16 school year marks the 150th anniversary of the 1865 founding of the Low-Heywood School, the oldest of the three schools that would become King. The anniversary has sparked a year of celebration for the school, which teaches some 700 students from preschool through 12th grade and has undergone a multitude of changes to its name, its student body and its campus over the past century and a half.

The anniversary also has the school taking stock of its past — in addition to Starr’s services, it has commissioned a book on the school’s history — in a way that it hopes will lead to a fruitful future.

The question, said Thomas Main, King’s headmaster, is, “What can we accomplish through the year of celebration?”

Sitting in his office in the campus’ “lower school” on a recent weekday morning, Main said he hoped the future would mirror the school’s most recent growth, and then some.

“Over the next 10 years, we want to continue to grow our endowment and think very carefully about the depth and breadth of our academic program,” he said.

Fifteen years ago, King’s endowment totaled some $2 million. Now it’s worth roughly $23 million. Main said he hoped to raise another $10 million in the next year.

That money, he said, would be used to improve teacher salaries and financial-aid opportunities, and augment roughly $35 million in improvements to the 36-acre campus made over the past decade, including the construction of a new middle school building and a performing arts center.

The campus has changed enough over the past 10 years to make it unrecognizable to most former students, Main said. Main, who has run the school for 14 years, began his career in 1983 as a coach and English teacher at the King Day School, one of King’s predecessors.

“If you’ve been around and seen the changes happen, it’s like watching your child grow up,” he said.

For Jennifer Guevara, a middle-school counselor at King, it’s an apt metaphor. Guevara graduated from the school in 1997. Her two children, Keith and Jordyn, attend the lower school.

“It’s nice to see that the school’s still evolving. It’s changing with the times,” she said. “When I graduated, there was no middle school.”

What is now the lower school, the southernmost building serving students from preschool through fifth grade, was formerly home to the King Day School, an all-boys school founded in downtown Stamford in 1875. After moving its location several times, the King School settled on Newfield Avenue in 1963, six years before the all-girls Low-Heywood school moved from Shippan Point to an adjacent Newfield property.

A third school, the all-girls Thomas School in Rowayton, merged with Low-Heywood in 1975. King’s current “upper school,” where ninth- through 12th-graders study, housed the Low-Heywood Thomas girls’ school. In 1988, amid enrollment and financial issues at the King School, the two merged, creating one coeducational school under the banner of King Low-Heywood Thomas.

Bill Pusack, a math teacher at the upper school, reflected on the evolution the school has undergone since his hiring at the all-girls Low-Heywood Thomas School.

“For all the changes, the kids stayed the same,” he said.

Karin Wagner, assistant head of the upper school, echoed Pusack: “For all the changes, the culture stayed the same.”

There was, however, one major cultural shift, Wagner said: the merging of two single-sex schools into one. Both she and art teacher Connie Nichols said an explicit effort was made during the merge to keep a strong emphasis on teaching girls to be strong leaders.

At the same time, Nichols said she found herself with an all-male class for the first time. “I said, ‘I’m going to have them come up with a new football helmet,’ ” she said with a smile. “It was the only thing I could think of.”

Bill Wallace, who taught math at the all-boys King School, said the merger took some getting used to, especially for parents who had specifically decided to send their children to a single-sex institution.

“I think there was some resentment,” he said of the reaction to the merge.

Twenty-seven years later, though, those concerns are in the rearview mirror.

“There’ve been good times, there’ve been bad times,” Wallace said. “This is my 38th year here. Obviously I’ve found a home.”